These questions—from live webinar participants—and Indi Young's answers were transcribed from the webinar "Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy". You can learn more about Indi's take from her Future Practice interview or by sampling the webinar. You can purchase and download the DRM-free one hour recording for US$79.

Webinar Participant: I know mental models are "verb" based, which I assume would be less about why and more about what. "Driving motivations" suggest the why, not just the what.

Indi Young: Mental models combine the things people do with the reasons why the do them. A person might do something because of a belief or as an emotional reaction to something. All of this, the what and the why, gets included in the towers of the mental model. Verbs help us get into playing the role of the person. It makes us say words they would say and begin to act and think like them. Nouns let us, as designers, stay at a slight remove from the people. Nouns don't have the immediacy and action of the verbs.

Webinar Participant: I can imagine that mental models help you remember/empathize with the motivations discovered via research. Is it a remembering tool perhaps less an analytic tool? But the process of creating them is analysis. I can see them becoming touchstones for a project/product. They are the memorable common ground.

Indi Young: Yes, mental models are a "remembering tool" and also an "analytic tool." The upper half of the diagram compacts all those voices into a readable structure which helps you understand what it's like to be that person. As you go over it yourself or with team members or with executives, all the stories pop up in your head and you say them out loud. (Wouldn't it be nice if you could click the boxes and hear the quotes? One day!)

The bottom half of the diagram is where you do your analysis. This seminar covered a few of the ways to do analysis. You can look at how well you support people today, add in how your competition supports people, and create an analysis of your market position. From this you can see a few steps forward, away from your competition. You can make tactical decisions about which areas to focus on, and which towers need better support, and how. By looking at a tower and reading the voices there, you can judge how well you cover all the things a person is trying to do there. You can engineer a better solution. Or you can decide that this particular mental model only hints at a different scope and then do the research to create another mental model in a different scope, which perhaps might help your organization expand to new audience segments. Or, this other mental model might be focused internally, to help you recognize and correct inefficiencies.

So yes, mental models are touchstones that you go back to over and over again to re-ground yourself in an audience segment's reality (broader than your own organization's intersection with them) and to make decisions about how to proceed with your offerings.

Webinar Participant: How do feasibility scores connect to the mental model? Does the model drive the scores? Are they independent? How is the "importance" gathered and measured? WHO is deciding the importance?

Indi Young: The only connection between feasibility scores and the mental model is that your team uses the mental model to outline several projects or offerings that your team can build or enhance. Feasibility scores then help your team decide which of these offerings has highest priority. The scores are determined by people on your team and by whoever is going to work on creating the offering and by leaders at your organization guiding the strategic direction. Scoring can have many aspects, like "available resources to do this now," "dependencies," "degree this will put you ahead of competition," "key for supporting customers," etc. You adopt aspects that make sense for your organization. The scoring is something that has been a part of various business processes, like Six Sigma, for years.

Webinar Participant: How do mental models and requirements compare/differ? Requirements are "things that the audience/business wants," but there are user requirements, too. You can't just ask users what they want; that doesn't work very well.

Indi Young: It's a way to make sure that you are actually designing things that users need. It sets out user's needs and under the tower how you'll design for those needs later.

When I used to write requirements documents, it focused more on how a particular already-agreed-upon-offering would function. Of my own volition, I would add paragraphs to the requirements about how a particular function would support a user and what the user was trying to get done. People really liked knowing that, so I took it broader and showed them, in a mental model, everything a person was trying to get done, not just within the context of the already-agreed-upon-offering. So with mental models, your team can see beyond the immediate project and into the real world, and they can perhaps stop a project and say, "Hey, this isn't going to really help. Why don't we make this other offering, instead? That would support so much more of what this person is trying to get done!" In this way, mental models replace requirements documents. You don't need to write them anymore. You only need to write the "story" of how your new offering will work.

It's also a lot like developing the "stories" in an agile process. Mental models are a way to map the stories initially so they can be expanded on later, and to group together all the user stories to show the big picture, which tends to get lost. It offers a way to keep track of the stories and keep them organized. It adds efficiency.

Webinar Participant: Can you come up with mental models using online survey tools, or do you have to talk to your users yourself?

Indi Young: Surveys suck at finding out what people are thinking. You have to have a conversation with people. Usually it's easiest to have a conversation by speaking. I have also used email as a successful medium for an open-ended kind of dialogue. The important concept to keep in mind is that you will never ask the same set of questions of two different people. Each person approaches things in their own unique way. Your questions need to respect that.

Webinar Participant: How do you know when you're finished, and the model is done?

Indi Young: As you add more and more voices/quotes to the model, you will find the need to make fewer changes to the structure that has formed. If you are still making changes to the structure when you reach the end of your voices/quotes, your mental model is not complete. You either need to collect more voices/quotes, or you need to comb through the data once more to get at the root of what people are saying. I have watched people comb through the data in a very high-level, generalized way, and it is agonizing. They never see the mental model come together.

Webinar Participant: Could you give us an idea please how much time one takes? And cost?

Indi Young: I wrote an appendix called "How Much Time & Money?" that didn't get printed as part of the book. It's available online.